SAN BERNARDINO -- Student William Kumler, 16, works on his new iPad in in Jonathan Danier Keck's world history class Thursday at Aquinas High School in San Bernardino. Aquinas High School has replaced textbooks with iPads.
LaFonzo Carter/Staff Photographer

SAN BERNARDINO -- Jonathan Danier Keck teaches his Latin class Thursday at Aquinas High School in San Bernardino. Aquinas High School has replaced textbooks with iPads.
LaFonzo Carter/Staff Photographer

No more pencils, no more books — at St. Aquinas High School in San Bernardino, both have gotten a 21st-century makeover.

The 400-student Catholic high school has replaced all textbooks with iPads for the 2013-2014 school year.

“We felt that this would engage them more deeply than a book,” school president Jim Brennan said. “They aren’t just passively listening to a lecture.”

As opposed to the static images on a page, content created for the tablets marries multimedia along with direct connections to the Internet, using wireless internet available in each classroom.

“With a textbook, you’re limited to what’s on the page,” principal Chris Barrows said. “Instead of just reading about 9/11, they have video of the attacks and follow-up and the text of the president’s speech (in response).”

Although the new school year only began on Aug. 12 at St. Aquinas, early reviews from students are positive.

“I’m personally very impressed,” senior William Kumler said. “You have links to Wikipedia, you have videos on the side (of lessons). Our chemistry teacher has put his PowerPoint (presentations) up for us to look at.”

“I think the kids took to it pretty well,” said Latin and history teacher Jonathan Keck, who participated in last year’s pilot program and helped develop the school-wide plan for this year.

It was teachers who had a harder time with it.

“Holy cow,” Brennan said, “It sort of scared the bejeebers out of (some of) them, because their paradigm has changed.”

Instead of teachers teaching one lesson simultaneously to all of their students, trading textbooks for tablets has enabled students to work in small groups, at their own collective pace, going on ahead of their peers or circling back to revisit past material.

And that approach — going beyond traditional teaching methods and teaching students to be independent learners — is key, according to Sam Gliksman, author of “iPad in Education For Dummies.”

“I think it’s got the potential to be a great educational tool, but I just worry about grafting it onto a model that isn’t working,” he said.

Ideally, “there’d be a lot more student-centered learning. Students working together, asking questions, collaborating. … The process would be more on the approach of having students coming up with the answer, as opposed to what we call ‘Sage on the Stage.’”

“By the time these kids are juniors or seniors, who knows” what kind of technology they’ll have access to, Gladstone principal James Ellis said. “Rather than being afraid of technology, we need to embrace it.”

Gliksman has a problem with how the LAUSD has said they’ll be using the iPad: With no guarantees of good Internet access at many campuses, the district is planning on having most of its educational content pre-loaded onto the tablet devices.

“Putting all the content on the iPad — it’s like buying a sports car and leaving it in first gear,” Gliksman said.

But flipping the educational model concerned some teachers at Aquinas, and they worried about a potential lack of control.

“It brought class management to a different level,” Keck said. “When a kid is messing with his phone, that’s obvious, but it’s a little harder when it’s a kid pretending to take notes.”

But that’s not a new issue, of course:

“There’s no guarantees that anyone’s going to do what they’re to be meant to be doing in class, whether they’re using iPads or not,” Gliksman said.

Still, early indications, and last year’s pilot program, suggest it’s going to be a success.

“Some of the (teachers) I didn’t think would take to it really did,” Keck said.

The school is able to control some aspects of the students’ experience with a mobile management software system, but in practice, chose to give most of the day-to-day control of the iPads over to the students.

In theory, the school could remotely monitor everything the students do with the iPads.

“I’ve met some people who are concerned about that,” Kumler said.

But their principal said it’s not likely to happen, unless there’s an emergency.

“It’s just too many kids and too many messages,” Barrows said.

The students take better care of tablets and other multimedia devices than they do with their regular textbooks.

“We’d find textbooks in the quad every day,” Barrows said. “But we’ve never found a phone or an iPad.”

During last year’s pilot program, only two of the 80 iPads got broken. All of them are covered by an insurance plan offered by Apple.

Officials spent the summer upgrading the school’s computer network and training teachers how to teach with iPads instead of textbooks. To pay for all of this, the school has added a $250 technology fee to pay for students’ rented iPad 2s and the software that comes pre-installed on it, atop the regular $6,750 annual tuition.

“You always get some push back when there’s (requests for more) money, but we’re doing something good for the kids,” Brennan said. “No one was jumping up and down upset.”

It’s a savings compared to traditional media.

“In the long run, when you put that technology fee against textbooks,” which parents also paid for, “it’s a huge savings,” Barrows said.

And, of course, it’s more fun for students.

“When we get all these (iPads) up and running, these kids will want to come to school,” Gladstone fourth grade teacher Adrian Wong said.

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.

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